“So where is she now?”
“It’s not that easy. She’s-you have to get it, you know? Dar-she’s not like other people. She’s, like, brilliant. I mean, she has this vision, she calls it. Justice for all. Not like that stupid shit that kids say in the flag salute. No, real justice for all people. She’s so smart and she’s so good. And she wants to know what other people are like. I mean, look at her. She’s this rich senator’s daughter, but she doesn’t touch her trust fund and she cut up all her credit cards and she left behind her car. The girl’s got a Porsche and she left it. She wants to feel what we feel.” Britt dropped her voice down. “She wants to feel what I feel.”
Sean remembered what Owens had said: Perhaps she secretly wishes she was a prostitute herself, so she could indulge herself and be paid for it.
Well, I’ll be damned, he thought.
“Britt,” he said slowly, “is Daryn working the streets herself? Right here in Oklahoma City?”
Britt gazed out toward the street. “Not the streets.” She swept an arm back toward the Oasis Motel. “Not this scene. She wanted to, but I thought-you know, no one would believe it. You meet her, and she’s just different, you know? The guys, the tricks, wouldn’t believe it. They’d think she was a female cop or something, trying to trap them. I mean, you know her, right? Could you see her in a place like this?”
“No,” Sean said. “No, I couldn’t.”
“So I told her she should-”
Much to Sean’s surprise, the girl started to cry.
Sean opened the car door and started to get out. Britt scrambled away from him with sudden vehemence. “Stay away! Don’t fucking touch me! Just don’t!”
Sean held up both hands and backed away. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry,” Britt whispered, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “You fucking men. You’re all sorry. You say you’re sorry and think you’ve got to take care of us. I’ve been taking care of myself since I was fourteen.” She sniffled again. “Shit, I told her she should set herself up as a, you know, a high-dollar call girl. Like an escort service.”
Sean drew in a breath.
“That sounds more like her, doesn’t it? Those escorts…they make big money, and the guys they see expect a woman to talk to them, to give them massages and stuff. They want to talk about…I don’t know what…like Shakespeare and stuff. Because they want it to be like they’re not paying a whore for sex. They have, like, two-hour minimums and some of them make a thousand bucks for the two hours. And they get to go in really nice hotel rooms, not dumps like this.”
“So you told Daryn McDermott to set herself up as an escort. Here in Oklahoma City.”
Britt nodded, sniffling again. “Yeah.”
“And did she?”
Britt nodded again.
“How do I find her?”
Britt smiled crookedly. She pulled her hair back from her face again, shaking the rain out of it. “Those girls that do escort gigs: They put up websites and everything. That’s how they get their tricks. She told me www.katpurrs.com. That’s Kat with a K. That’s her name now. She wanted to be totally new, so she’s Katherine-Kat.” Britt looked at the ground, almost shyly. “I helped her pick out the name.”
“It’s a good name.”
They looked at each other. After a long moment, Sean said, “Here, let me pay you for your time.”
Britt shook her head. “I only get paid for fucking, not for talking.” She spun around and walked toward a wine-colored minivan that had just pulled into the parking lot.
“So you do,” Sean said, dropped the Jeep into gear, and drove north.
Britt had two more tricks right in a row before she got a break. The guy in the minivan paid her for half-and-half, but he couldn’t finish inside her, kept losing his hard-on. She wound up wasting nearly half an hour and three condoms on him. Then, right after that, a big black guy named Elvin, a semiregular customer, wanted a BJ in his car before he headed home to his wife.
After Elvin was gone, she went into her motel room, closed the door, and went to the bathroom. She took a quick shower, then gargled with Listerine. Feeling better, a little cleaner, she made the call.
The other woman’s voice was soft and low on the phone. “Hello, this is Kat.”
“Hi, it’s me. I mean, Britt. It’s me.”
“Hey, sweetie. I know your voice by now. What’s up?”
“There was a guy here,” Britt said.
There was a short silence. “Go on.”
“Tall, red hair, driving a Jeep, Arizona plates. Who is he? He acted like he knew you.”
“Hmm.”
“What?”
“Nothing. It was bound to happen. It just happened sooner rather than later.”
“What? What do you mean by that?”
“Don’t worry. It’s fine. It’s just as well that he came now.”
Britt thought for a moment. “Have you been okay?”
“Fine, sweetie. A little tired tonight. I had a bad headache yesterday, but it went away. I’m doing just great.”
“Daryn? Daryn, when can I see you?”
There was a slight clucking noise. “Remember, I’m Kat now. I’m always Kat.”
“I know. I just…I like the sound of your name. Your real name.”
“I know you do. Soon, Britt. We’ll see each other soon.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, honey.”
“I love you,” Britt said, but the line was already dead.
8
FAITH WAS SITTING ON THE COUCH READING, WITH Joe Sample’s new solo piano CD on the stereo, when Sean returned to the house at a little after nine o’clock. She looked up from her paperback copy of Blood Will Tell, about the famous Cullen Davis murder trials in Texas in the seventies, to see her brother, dripping wet, standing there with a mostly empty Jack Daniel’s bottle clutched in one hand.
“Hey, baby sister,” he said, shaking the rain off himself. “Is the weather always like this here?”
Faith put down her book. “Just in the spring, mainly. That’s the stormy season. Looks like you’ve been out in it.”
“Yep.” He sat beside her, placing the whiskey bottle very carefully on the table. Her eyes followed the bottle. “You and your books and your jazz,” Sean said. “Don’t you ever watch TV or anything?”
“Most TV is crap,” Faith said. “I catch C-SPAN sometimes.”
“Oh, that’s exciting.”
Faith shrugged. “Find your hooker?”
“I did.”
“Get what you wanted?”
“She pointed me in the right direction.”
Sean pulled the bottle to him and swigged from it. “Want a drink?” he offered.
“No, thanks.”
“More for me.”
“I could get you a glass,” Faith said, looking at him.
“I don’t want to dirty any of your glasses. I put in a load of laundry this morning, by the way.”
“So I saw. Thanks.”
They sat in silence for a few seconds.
“Have you told Mom and Dad that you’re here?” Faith said after a while.
“Nope. None of their business. If I did, you know how it would go. Dad would just try to find out what the two of us talked about. Always being the captain, trying to control us the way he controls his department.”
Faith said nothing.
“Come on, admit it. I bet you five thousand dollars that every time you talk to the old man on the phone and mention that you’ve talked to me or e-mailed me he wants to know what it was about. We live in three separate states, and he still wants to control the way you and I talk to each other.”
“No bet,” Faith said.
Sean nodded. “I knew I was right.” He leaned back against the couch and closed his eyes. The bourbon had taken the edge off, and he was in the gray in-between area. He’d been a bit shaky through the whole encounter on Shields Boulevard with Monica and Britt, but he’d started on the bottle as he drove back here, feeling flushed with knowing how he’d unearthed Daryn McDermott. Now he wasn’t quite totally shit-faced either. He might get shaky again if he had any more, but for now he was somewhere between the two. Having a little more might be nice, but he’d drunk all of Faith’s beer this morning and he didn’t think she had anything else in the house.